The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Posted on | March 6, 2025 | Comments Off on Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

Nate Silver (left); G. Elliott Morris (right)

While I await the arrival of Sidney Blumenthal’s book The Permanent Campaign — ordered from Amazon yesterday, because I need to reference it for a future American Spectator column — permit me to climb aboard the bandwagon of those celebrating this happy news:

Disney axed Nate Silver’s once-influential FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday as part of sweeping job cuts at ABC News, ending the data-driven political site’s seven-year run at the network.
FiveThirtyEight gained national prominence for its statistical approach to political forecasting but drew criticism for misses in key elections, most notably giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning the 2016 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight’s editorial director of data analytics, G. Elliott Morris, confirmed the layoffs on Bluesky on Wednesday, writing, “As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning. This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues.” . . .
Silver, who founded the site in 2008 and left ABC in May 2023, wrote on X, “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
Silver left ABC amid reports of tension with network executives over resource allocation and editorial direction. . . .
FiveThirtyEight began as an independent polling aggregation platform before being licensed to The New York Times, then acquired by ESPN in 2013, and later transferred to ABC News.
Despite shuttering the project, ABC News said it would “continue to provide the best-in-class polling and political data analysis that it has offered for decades.”

Well, there’s a lot to work through here and I suppose the best place to begin is with ABC News claiming to offer “best-in-class polling,” to which my reply can be summarized briefly: LOL, are you kidding me?

In August, after Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, ABC News and the Washington Post sponsored a poll by Ipsos that had Harris leading Trump by 4 points, 49% to 45%, among registered voters. Two weeks later, ABC News alone sponsored the Ipsos poll, which again had Harris leading by 4 points, 50% to Trump’s 46%. Then in mid-September, the ABC/Ipso poll reported: “This poll finds the race at 51-46 percent, Harris-Trump, among all adults; 51-47 percent among registered voters; and 52-46 percent among likely voters.”

Harris SIX POINTS AHEAD among likely voters!

This was the last 2024 poll published under the aegis of ABC News, and when the votes were all counted in November — including the suspiciously long count in California — Trump won by a margin of 1.5%, meaning that ABC News was off by more than 7 points in the wrong direction. So much for ABC News and their “best-in-class polling.”

As for Nate Silver and the history of FiveThirtyEight, it began as a pseudonymous blog on Daily Kos in 2007. Silver’s background was doing economic analysis in the business world and, with great success, doing statistical analysis of baseball. Silver has never been a pollster — that is to say, he has no experience in “field work” — and the methods by which he deduces electoral probability from public polling data are rather opaque. Nevertheless, his prediction for the 2008 election was so spot-on that it made him an overnight celebrity in the world of politics, and landed him a book contract reportedly worth $700,000 in advance.

In 2010, FiveThirtyEight began publishing under the New York Times masthead. This arrangement continued for about three years, until mid-2013, when ESPN announced it had bought the FiveThirtyEight franchise and that “Silver will serve as editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors.” ESPN is a sports network, and made mention of Silver’s baseball analysis skills in their announcement. They also mentioned that Silver would be appearing on their sister network, ABC News (both being properties of Disney). In 2018, FiveThirtyEight was transferred to the ABC News division, and five years later, Silver left ABC News, with FiveThirtyEight then being taken over by G. Elliott Morris, who had become “the new hotness” because of his predictions about the 2018 midterm elections.

So, in the 2024 cycle, Silver was doing his election probability thing on his own Substack blog, while Morris was running FiveThirtyEight for ABC News, and did either one of them predict a Trump victory?

NO, MA’AM, THEY DID NOT.

The fact that Trump not only won the Electoral College (as he had done in 2016) but also won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of 2.3 million votes — which he had not done in 2016 — means that predicting a Trump win in 2024 should have been easier than eight years earlier. Yet somehow these two statistical wizards managed to miss this one.

The reason I call attention to this glaring failure of both FiveThirtyEight (under ABC News and G. Elliott Morris) and the site’s founder Nate Silver, is because in noting the demise of FiveThirtyEight, Professor Glenn Reynolds links to Nate’s blog post bemoaning the sad fate of his brainchild and — oh, boy! — let me remind you that denial is not the name of a river in Egypt. Silver declares that “the media just lost an extremely valuable resource,” raising the obvious question, “Valuable to whom?” If FiveThirtyEight’s stock-in-trade was predicting election outcomes, how are they so “valuable” when they got it wrong in 2024?

Perhaps a better metric of FiveThirtyEight’s value would be the fact that ABC News didn’t sell the site — for which their parent company paid a pretty penny, years ago — but rather shut it down. Had there been any market value to the site, why weren’t there any other media operations offering cash to acquire it from ABC News? The obvious answer is that FiveThirtyEight was always a money-losing operation, first for the New York Times, and then under Disney ownership, first at ESPN and then at ABC News. The salaries of the staff always exceeded whatever revenue was generated by FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver goes on to say that there is a “bright future” for the kind of “data journalism” that FiveThirtyEight did, by which I suppose he means that there’s always a market for predicting elections wrong, so long as your error favors Democrats.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And also, linked by John Nolte at Breitbart.com — thanks!

UPDATE II: Linked at Real Clear Politics — thanks!



 

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Category: ABC, Media Bias, Polls

In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | March 6, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.06.25 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Maybe I’ll be able to stay up late enough tonight to get the evening edition done.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Arkansas Is NOT a Place to Run from Police, also Texans Are Still Armed
Director Blue: Top 20 Democrat Ironies
EBL: Homestead, also, State Of The Union
Twitchy: Sounds Like Adam Schiff Better Buckle Up Because It’s About To Get Real, Thread From Doctor Who Had Birds-Eye View Of Democrats During Trump’s Speech A Must-Read, and Megyn Kelly Ends Hateful Hag For Laughing At Video Of Tranny Injuring Payton McNabb
Louder With Crowder: Here are all the moments Democrats embarrassed themselves during Trump’s most pro-America speech ever, Multiple liberal cities are suing the Trump Admin, claim that being a sanctuary for illegals makes their city “safer”, Trump’s America and Why Liberals Won’t Stand for Anything, The culprit responsible for 23 Dem senators sharing the same propaganda identified themselves, and it makes sense now, and America is Back – Breaking Down Everything You Missed in Trump’s Joint Address
Vox Popoli: Clown World’s Bluff, 20 Percent Tariffs on China, Clown World Abandons Taiwan, Leaving NATO, and Another Review of SAPIENS 
Cedar Sanderson: Domestic Bliss
Bugscuffle Gazette: Iron Does Not Lie
Stoic Observations: Beware of Brainiac
Postcards From Barsoom: Fixing The Fertility Crisis
Gab: The Soul
Toni Airaksinen: Anti-Semitic Nurse Facing Investigations After Refusing To Treat Jews, Calling Them “Vermin”, “Rats”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: A DARPA Floaty USV Thingy?
Dana Loesch: Is BlackRock Running The Panama Canal Moderately Better Than The CCP? also, Activist Judges – A Look At Judge Amir H. Ali
Don Surber: Zelensky & The Art of the Trumpenfreude
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Another Humpday Shrapnel Post

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Best Sellers – Patio, Lawn, & Garden


 

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In The Mailbox: 03.05.25 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | March 5, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.05.25 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: What Happens When Health Care Becomes a .gov Bureaucracy?
EBL: Democrat Messaging Disaster, also, UK Troops In Ukraine?
Twitchy: “We’re Not Gonna Put Up With It!”, Michael Cohen (No, Not That One) Calls Trump Racist For Mocking Fauxcahontas’ Indian Lies, and Reddit Map Of America After Hypothetical WW3 Is Pure Leftist Fantasy
Louder With Crowder: Democrats forget how the internet works, release 22 videos of different senators reading the exact same anti-Trump diatribe, Joy Behar left SPEECHLESS after Stephen A. Smith calls her out for denying Trump won in a landslide, A Liberal woman turns herself into Zelenskyy in a bizarre make-up tutorial video and…wait, she does what now? Finally! Recall Papers Filed Against LA Mayor After Her Fire Failures, and What Are Pam Bondi’s Real Motivations?
Vox Popoli: Yes, English IS Our Official Language, The Crimean War 2.0, White Bull at Mobile World, The Mysterious Omission, and Leave NATO, Leave the UN
Bugscuffle Gazette: Social Media, 
Defending The Wood Perilous: On Angels, Revisited, 
Toni Airaksinen: UC-Santa Cruz Is Hiring For Palestine Studies – But Not Israel Studies?
Jim McCoy: The Neck Romancer
Upstream Reviews: The Cosmic Courtship

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Privateers – Now More Than Ever
Dana Loesch: Zelensky Was Petulant & Wrong, also, Democrats Double Down On Crazy At The Joint Address
Don Surber: Desperate Democrats
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Mental Sorbet
STUMP: Mortality Classics – Broken Heart Syndrome, also, The Week In Meep

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Tuesday Speech YUGE Win for Trump; Democrats Self-Destruct on Live TV

Posted on | March 5, 2025 | Comments Off on Tuesday Speech YUGE Win for Trump; Democrats Self-Destruct on Live TV

Probably I need to go ahead and write that column I’ve been kicking around in my head for the past couple of weeks, based on Sidney Blumenthal’s idea of The Permanent Campaign, but not right now.

There will be time enough later for deep-dive analysis of how the Democrats have lost their way, but at the present moment what matters more is what an absolute triumph Donald Trump’s Tuesday night speech was. The “instant” polls by both CNN and CBS News showed overwhelming approval by those who watched it, and while we may discount those numbers somewhat — after all, Trump supporters were more likely than Trump haters to be watching his speech — it’s still a clear win. We’re only 43 days into Trump’s second term, and we don’t know what the future holds, but there can be no denying that he now has strong momentum, and the Democrats don’t know how to cope.

“This is an indictment, in my opinion, on the Democratic leadership,” Symone Sanders said on MSNBC and, do you know who Symone Sanders is? She was national press secretary for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, then in 2020 she worked on Joe Biden’s campaign before becoming senior advisor for Kamala Harris. In other words, she’s about as hard-core Democrat as you could find and, if the Democrats have lost Symone Sanders . . . ? Dude, they are so toast.



 

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Category: Democrats, Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 03.04.25

Posted on | March 5, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.04.25

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in February.
The Spring 2025 Based Book Sale After Action Report
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Director Blue: Top 20 Stunners From The Musk-Rogan Discussion
357 Magnum: Sparky Car Sparking in Korea
EBL: Zelensky is about to learn the meaning of FAFO, Brave The Dark, Good: Europe can defend Ukraine from now on, The Last Rifleman, and David Johansen, RIP
Twitchy: The Look On Nancy Pelosi’s Face Tells The Whole Story For Democrats, Democrats Can’t Bring Themselves To Applaud Kid Who Survived Brain Cancer, and “How Did That Work Out?” Trump Calls Out Democrats’ Failed Lawfare To Their Faces
Louder With Crowder: Should Trump Ditch Free-riding NATO After Zelensky Blowup? Military family reunited with their missing kitty after the movers  discovered where the cat had been hiding for three weeks, AOC blames GOP for America’s open borders, but that’s not as silly as what she said about the Laken Riley Act, NYT drops despicable anti-Elon Musk hit piece tying him to apartheid… but didn’t they try this one already? and Mike Johnson shoots straight on Medicaid reform, calls the program “not for 29-year-old males playing video games”
Vox Popoli: The Euthypro Deception, Sigma Game and Diplomacy, The Cathedra Hoodie, What Three Years Hath Wrought, and Free Trade is What It Is
Stoic Observations: Intelligence vs. Virtue
L’Ombre de L’Olivier: Can Ukraine Win Now? also, Clash of Worldview
Dr. Mauser: Lewd Anime Memes
Bugscuffle Gazette: Shifting Priorities, also, Advice for Writers
Upstream Review: Tales of the Mongoose & Meerkat
Defending The Wood Perilous: The Project Is A Go!
Gab: The Meaning of Work

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Securing Ukraine’s Future Security, 
Don Surber: Trump may have killed NATO too
Glenn Reynolds: What I Did This Weekend
STUMP: Pension Watch – February 2025

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New Releases – Automotive


 

Category: Linkagery

Oscar Winner Decides to ‘Recognize and Honor the Sex Worker Community’

Posted on | March 4, 2025 | Comments Off on Oscar Winner Decides to ‘Recognize and Honor the Sex Worker Community’

Because I haven’t watched the annual Oscar ceremony in years — and I suspect few of my readers watch it, either — this bit of Hollywood news was somewhat confusing to me. Who is Mikey Madison and what did she do in the movie Anora to merit the Best Actress award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Wikipedia:

Mikaela Madison Rosberg (born March 25, 1999), known professionally as Mikey Madison, is an American actress. She began her career acting in short films and received recognition for her role as a sullen teenager in the FX comedy series Better Things (2016–2022). Madison then played Susan Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s comedy-drama film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Amber Freeman in the horror film Scream (2022).
Madison gained wider recognition for playing the titular role of a sex worker in Sean Baker’s film Anora (2024), winning the BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Actress.

OK, so she was in a Tarantino flick, which is rather an impressive credential to have acquired at such a young age. But what is this movie Anora? This is from Wikipedia’s plot summary:

Anora “Ani” Mikheeva is a 23-year-old stripper living in Brighton Beach, a Russian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City. Her boss introduces her to Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov, the young son of the Russian oligarch Nikolai Zakharov, who requests someone fluent in Russian. Although Vanya is in the United States to study, he spends most of his time partying and playing video games in his family’s Brooklyn mansion.
Vanya hires Ani for several encounters and pays her $15,000 to stay with him for a week. During a trip to Las Vegas, he impulsively proposes. Despite her skepticism, Ani agrees, and they elope at a wedding chapel. She quits her job and moves into Vanya’s mansion. When news of the marriage reaches Russia, Vanya’s mother Galina orders his Armenian godfather Toros to find them and arrange an annulment while she and Nikolai fly to the U.S.
Toros sends his henchmen, Garnik and Igor, to the house. They inform Vanya that his parents are taking him back to Russia and enrage Ani by calling her a prostitute and suggesting that Vanya only married her to obtain a green card. . . .

Much drama ensues. Made for a modest budget of $6 million, the movie has grossed $40 million, so at least it was profitable. However, there’s no way Mikey Madison would have gotten the Best Actress award had it not been for the controversy that destroyed the Oscar hopes of transgender Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón. That was amazing, wasn’t it? Transgenderism is nowadays the most fashionable cause célèbre in Hollywood, and the Oscar committee would have been delighted to give the Best Actress award to Gascón, but unfortunately for the “actress” formerly known as Carlos, he/“she” had once said some rude (if arguably true) things about Muslims on social media, and when this was discovered, it was “cancel” time for the Spanish tranny. This is how the young star of Anora got her Oscar, which then gave her the opportunity to express solidarity with “the sex worker community”:

“I just want to recognize and honor the sex worker community. . . . I will continue to support and be an ally. All of the incredible people, the women that I’ve had the privilege of meeting from that community, has been one of the highlights of this incredible experience.”

[ Church Lady voice ] Well, isn’t that special?

Because the representative of the transgender community got caught dissing the Muslim community, it’s a win for the sex worker community.

And just by the way, if you’re going to “recognize and honor” all the “incredible” women from “the sex worker community” — it was such a “privilege” just to meet them! — why not extend this gratitude to others involved in the vital business of sex work? Why not give a shout-out to the pimps and johns, and the strip club bouncers? How about being more specific about the “incredible” people and the work they do in the “community”? The strippers, the call girls, the street walkers, the meth-addicted truck-stop “lot lizards”? Go ahead and be inclusive — give a shout-out to the gigolos, the rentboys, the tranny hookers. Let’s not forget the OnlyFans girls and the legions of loyal simps who pay them money.

All this on prime-time TV. I’m sure the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are proud of themselves.



 

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Category: Hollywood

Rule 5 Sunday: Denim on the Beach

Posted on | March 3, 2025 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Denim on the Beach

— compiled by Wombat-socho

This week’s appetizer thanks to kbdabear’s Saturday Night Sideboob post.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five White House Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Captain America, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Friday Night Bush, The Heavy Water War, Pompeii’s Secret Cult, Gene Hackman RIP, Michelle Trachtenberg RIP, Visions Of The Future|Retro Future AI, The Bride/La Sposa, The Charleston, Bob Dobbs Discovers Johnny Cash, Claudia Gusmano, The Love Witch, Roberta Flack, Polytechnique, The Loneliest Planet, and Un Beau Soleil Interieur.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Keilah Kang Killian, Fish Pic Friday – Anne Marie, Thursday Tanlines, Taking Out the Bay Trash, The Wednesday Wetness, No. 7 Road, RIP: Roberta Flack, D.C. Issues Fish Consumption Advisories over PFAS, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Who Gives a Hoot? and Palm Sunday 

BACON TIME: Rule 5 Redheads

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Ain’t I Done Told Y’all? Democrats Pushed Zelenskyy to Sabotage White House Deal

Posted on | March 2, 2025 | Comments Off on Ain’t I Done Told Y’all? Democrats Pushed Zelenskyy to Sabotage White House Deal

Note the time and date on that, please — shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Friday, I shared my suspicion that the real reason why that White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned into a s***show was that Zelenskyy had been encouraged by Democrats to “pull that stunt,” and now my hunch has been validated:

Before meeting Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
“Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine,” Murphy’s office posted on X at 11:15 a.m. Friday.
He attached a picture of Zelensky at a conference table, with Murphy seated on the opposite side.
Forty minutes later, Zelensky arrived at the White House, where Trump met his car, smiled, shook his hand and walked him into the Oval Office.
The meeting, as the world now knows, quickly went off the rails and ended with Trump angrily ejecting the arrogant ingrate from the White House.
The earlier meeting with Dems undercuts wild claims that Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance staged an ambush. In fact, it was Zelensky who came with an ulterior motive.
The purpose of the meeting was to sign the mineral agreement he and Trump representatives had negotiated. He had twice refused to sign it after promising to, and thanks to Murphy, we now know he had no intention of signing it Friday.

An old saying, often cited by Hillary Clinton: “If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, the one thing you know is, it didn’t crawl up there by itself.” This meeting with Zelenskyy turning into a catastrophe was not a coincidence, you see. The whole thing was a setup by Democrats. In his column Michael Goodwin of the New York Post points out that this mineral deal — the whole purpose of the White House meeting was for Zelenskyy to sign the treaty — was something that Zelenskyy himself had suggested, and it was also Zelenskyy who insisted on a White House setting for the occasion. Democrats were behind the whole thing, see?

Well, let them own the consequences now. Also let me say this clearly: Fuck Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the horse he rode in on.



 

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Category: Democrats, Donald Trump, Ukraine
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